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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: brigidmac on Saturday 14 December 24 01:14 GMT (UK)
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I know this is controversial but I'm having a go at using ethnicity to pinpoint mutual ancestors
As many of you know Im a fan of using regional differences
CASE 1
I've been trying to find the link between a Scottish gold miner who went to Canada and a lumberjack s family on the border of USA.
At first sight it's not very hopeful
As there is a big variation between 4 siblings
They are 26-43cm matches with me
I believe they are. half 2c2r ancestry predicts
They all have french & Germanic from mother's side
My paternal aunt has mostly Scottish but some Irish
These are the 4 siblings DNA percentages
Scottish 38% 37% . 25%. +2%
Eng 28%. 6%. 0%. 26%
French 31%. 31%. 55%. 55%
Germanic 4% 14%. 17%. 17%
I'm not sure that looking for their cousins with Scottish percentage is going to help with this one
CASE 2
Someone looking for bio father whose DNA should be Irish with about 6%germanic
I've built a tree from mutual matches+believe I've found one paternal great grandmother
+ Am colour coding any matches with Germanic
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Good luck with those B, it looks like quite a task.
If the DNA matches are in Canada you are certainly going to have issues if my own research there is any indication.
The location of records is disjointed as it what you might find. Census records are there but hit and miss as to what has been digitised.
https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/index
There are also the Henderson Directories that might help.
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Thanks biggles the DNA matches are in Michagen but the lumberjack ancestor used to go across the border to work in Canada and lived there with a family at some point.
I don't know if the Scottish gold miner
W3nt to USA on his way back to Scotland
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I never pay much attention to ethnicity/origins as they change with the wind, initially my half sibling had just 5% Irish which was all from our father whereas I had 50%, after an update she dropped to zero and I went up to 65%, the next update dropped me to 45% and she went back to 5%, the last update puts us at 35% and 40% respectively. The predictions are so variable they are meaningless.
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I know what you mean Glen but occasionally a particular ethnicity is significant. My mother has 1 Jewish grandparent & 1 Welsh grandparents
1 Scottish great grandparents and links to matches with 90-100 percent of those ethnicities and shared matches do descend from their ancestors
Occasionally new definitions turn out to be significant
A friend has Cornish father + Welsh African mother. Matches are specific to Ghana + Congo and Cornwall shows up in matches
I'm hoping that this Germanic ethnicity will show up in matches
To someone who doesn't know her father and we.ll be able to narrow down grandfathers line I think I've identified the paternal grandmother
I'm colour coding paternal matches that have germanic when I see them
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Glen how long ago did you test ?
Initially Irish Welsh and Scottish were less well defined and there was no Cornish
If you have ancestors s from isle of Man or isle of wight ....they may have particular markers in DNA but get out into wrong box
I suspect your present amounts are more accurate..have you found Irish grandparents and what ethnicities did you gain when you lost the IRISH. ??
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Case 1 is about how S McMartin s lumberjack family matches to miner Charles Stevenson who went from Lanarkshire Scotland to Canadian gold miner and brought back a gold nugget for all his nieces and great nieces to make into jewelry. I don't know if the brothers got anything
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=887971.msg7612430#msg7612430
I've had some success on case 2
Which is the FULLER FLEMING story.
I LL add the links
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=887972.0
A key person seems to be their daughter Caroline Jane FULLER
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Case 3
HJ My mother's grandmother Mary s grandmother was Scottish . Married Nimrod Gardner
The only ancestor from Scotland
Corresponding with her 8% Scottish Ethnicity
It took a long time to discover that her maiden name was BROWN and that her birth region was Dumfriesshire
HJ has a few matches which I suspected were from this ancestor
The top one apart from her half cousin and a
35cm contacted tree manager and learned that the matches mother was an adoptee mother's maiden name Oag
No connections to that surname so conclusion thru her bio grandfather unknown
That person has 84%scottish origins 12. shared matches with HJ
Including the half cousin who shares the grandmother with a Scottish grandmother
The next match by 48cm has 55%scotish and comes from a long line of JARDINE s from Dumfriesshire
Great grandmother Nicolas KERR 1844 also from Dumfries married John JARDINE whose mother's name was HALL .*which could be the link to the Northamptonshire GARDNERs
Next shared match 42cm also half Scottish again unsurprisingly no surnames in common on either of these 2as we didnt know Mary BROWNs lineage
Since recent developments he now appears on thru lines as 5th C1R
I will explain how we found her parents names and I'm now going to use pro tools with the remaining matches
From.21cm -34cm.
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I tested back in 2021 but both parents and at least one grandparent are NPE's. I have no full sibs or full 1c's.
It's about the worst case scenario possible and difficult to determine whether many of my matches are full or half cousins as there are a lot of travelling showmen and military connections involved along with illegitimate children in the mix. There are advantages to half matches in certain circumstances but there's also disadvantages that come with them too.
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Case 2 is a bit like that she knows her Irish mother
But father could be NPEand only child closest matches are at 2nd cousin and half 2nd cousin
If I'm correct Caroline Jane FULLER must have had a baby before marriage
Now have a group that don't match Fullers so think it's from Caroline's Welsh lover
Ethnicity is helping here because that's the group of people with Welsh and Germanic
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My grandmother had children through at least 3 relationships though she was only married twice.
Hubby #1 was Irish but the two great grandchildren from that relationship vary from 3%-46% (they are full 1st cousins and share over 1000cM with each other).
Hubby #2 has Irish ancestors and the great grandchild from that side has an Irish grandfather too but is just 16% Irish.
My half sister and myself are a generation above everyone else and come from relationship #3. I've noticed a typo in my original comment as the last update is 15% for her and 40% for me, not 35 and 40 as I originally said.
I've never been happy with the difference between myself and my half sister but I struggle more with the others. The 3% and 46% pair are just too far apart to convince me ethnicity is accurate enough to be useful.
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I think that's within the range of differences . Doesn't shock me as we all inherit little bits from different ancestors. My sister's have not tested and I don't have many exams of people who's siblings are on my radar
Pro tools have taught me that some of my unknown are in fact siblings to another of my matches
& Now I can compare 4 siblings and get ideas of the ranges .
An Indian man told me he wants to do DNA+ I agreed to help
Also will help a polish friend
And a Lithuanian who recently bought a kit
I managed kit for man whose father was Cornish+ mother African/Welsh
& Another whose father is mostly Irish and a bit Germanic & mother Welsh
The parents have no crossovers of amounts
The finds are fascinating
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I have a particular case I'd like to ask about please.
I want to try to identify my maternal great grandfather. My grandmother was adopted (in Melbourne, Australia), her birth mother was named on her birth documentation but her father was not.
Using the Leeds method I have been able to separate out my maternal & paternal sides and identify matches descending from my maternal grandmother and grandfather. I was able to find DNA matches that pointed to sisters of my great grandmother and so identify her. But so far no luck on finding usable matches for my great grandfather.
Like others here, I don't give much credence to ethnicity results. But feeling a bit desperate, I decided to try to use ethnicity at FTDNA, My Heritage and Ancestry to try to at least identify where he may have come from. They all have different groupings of course, but results aren't too different in my case. This is how my logic went:
1. My ethnicity is mixed between England, Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia/Northern Europe.
2. My dad's family migrated to Australia 170 years ago from eastern England, his father's family from Yorkshie where there was once a Viking population. This is roughly confirmed by my having roughly 50% from UK & Scandinavia/Western Europe.
3. If I take those percentages out of my ethnicity, the remainder is about 20-25% Scottish & 25-30% Irish (varies with each company).
4. My known maternal ancestors come from Ireland & Scotland, with the theoretical mix being:
- 31.25% Irish
- 6.25% Scottish
- 12.5% unknown (my missing great grandfather)
5. The only way to achieve something like my actual percentages (in #3 above) is for the missing great grandfather to be Scottish.
Of course the numbers don't add up neatly, but all three companies give (broadly) the same result.
My question is: has anyone else used an approach like this and later (when they had identified their ancestor) found the calculation gave a reasonable result (or didn't)?
Thanks.
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Eric.
In answer to your question, sort of.
For me Ancestry’s ethnicity is getting more accurate with each iteration.
I could not resolve why there was only a smattering of Welsh and a large Irish percentage.
Nor how Italian went from nothing to 1/4.
Then DNA matches started to show and over the years they built up.
What these showed was that were one or more NPE’s in my family, initially what
I did not expect was that they were so close.
Now with the latest split in the Ancestry target populations I can see where my Irish ancestors were from and which lines are from each of these areas. This in turn sort of supports what documented evidence there is.
Various family members travelled from all over Ireland to Manchester and Bradford, there they married other Irish immigrants and this helped tremendously as English records are vastly superior to what there is in the Emerald Isle.
Strangely on my Italian side different families travelled to England and settled in Bradford but they all originated from a 20 mile radius area south east of Rome, they too initially married others of Italian origin and the Ancestry region gives their region correctly all be it it is the whole of southern mainland Italy.
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Eric, but what exactly do you mean by saying that your grandfather is probably Scottish? He's probably got bits of Scandinavian, northwest Europe and Irish.
I'm really starting to believe that we should not bother for another five years. They might have it sorted out by then.
Zaph
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Eric, but what exactly do you mean by saying that your grandfather is probably Scottish? He's probably got bits of Scandinavian, northwest Europe and Irish.
In doing that analysis, I ignored small percentages (3% or below), and of course I accepted that the numbers wouldn't totally add up. So I agree that he probably had small percentages of other ethnicities. But I'm deducing (whether rightly or not) that his major ethnicity was Scottish.
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In answer to your question, sort of.
For me Ancestry’s ethnicity is getting more accurate with each iteration.
Thanks for the interesting reflections. I guess "sort of" is some sort of endorsement of the approach.
And I agree that Ancestry's latest ethnicity calculations are impressive.
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The only thing I've found ethnicity specifically useful for is when a match appears to have no link in their tree. I often check the ethnicity of the match, particularly for US trees. Sometimes you will find the tree has no correspondence to the ethnicity. In these cases you will often find the spouse of the linked/home person is the actual match.